The Ice Planet

Daily Mail, 8 February 2010

Yesterday, jaws up and down the land dropped to the floor as Alastair Campbell appeared to lose his composure under questioning by Andrew Marr on his BBC TV show.

The arch media manipulator, whose hitherto impregnable armour had withstood serial public inquiries and innumerable interrogations, appeared for a few seconds almost to lose it altogether when he was pressed over Tony Blair’s evidence to the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war.

Marr asked insistently whether, if the inquiry concluded that the pre-invasion intelligence had not established ‘beyond doubt’ that Saddam had possessed weapons of mass destruction as Tony Blair had claimed, it would follow that Blair had misled Parliament.

Campbell got out the words ‘As I said’, then stopped dead and heavily blew out his cheeks, remaining silent with his eyes lowered for some time before finally answering the question and claiming to have been ‘upset’ by it.

Some will see this as establishing beyond doubt a shameless new low in spin, trying to get out of trouble when faced with a killer question by playing the sympathy card.

I’m not so sure about that. He said he was upset - but there was no sign of that theatrical prop, the wobbling lip. It looked instead to me as if Campbell — who, after all, has a history of emotional instability — was struck by a panic attack and was having difficulty with his breathing.

If true, that in turn could be taken either way. Those who believe that both Campbell and Blair have consistently lied through their teeth about the war in Iraq will think that if this was a genuine loss of composure, it was surely proof that he thought his guilt was finally about to be exposed.

Those, however, who don’t think that we were lied to over Iraq — and who perhaps also know a bit about panic attacks — may find it all too plausible that the terrifying impossibility of prising open closed minds on this subject produced a momentary meltdown.

Whatever the truth of this curious episode, the fact is that Campbell sought to finesse it by saying he was upset because ‘I’ve been through a lot on this’.

Cynical as this may sound, there is no doubt that appealing to public sympathy is now a way to score political points or a ‘get out of jail free’ card in public debate.

We see this when politicians use personal adversity to tug at the heart-strings. And what all but silences any cynicism is that such politicians’ personal anguish is all too real.

We saw it over David Cameron’s disabled young son, Ivan, who, before he died a year ago, featured in many moving interviews with Cameron and accounts of his family life.

Some found this tasteless and exploitative; Cameron himself simply said that Ivan was a part of his life he was not prepared to conceal.

What was undeniable was the wave of public sympathy this engendered for Cameron, and the way this humanised the hitherto callous and uncaring image of a Tory politician.

Now we learn that in a forthcoming TV interview, Gordon Brown is overcome by emotion when talking about his daughter who died in 2002, ten days after being born prematurely.

Hitherto, the intensely private Brown has conspicuously refrained from doing anything that might be construed as making political capital out of this tragedy. Yet now, he apparently weeps on camera when asked about his daughter - questions to which he must have agreed in advance of the interview.

It is surely no coincidence that he is now being advised generally on presentation by none other than Alastair Campbell - who said yesterday that the only way to avoid the perception of spin was to be ‘genuinely authentic’.

Of course, the danger is that people may well conclude that such ‘genuinely authentic’ emotion is just an even more shameless act of spin. But Campbell is reflecting the fact that it is only by emoting in public that so many people today believe you have any heart at all.

We saw this most spectacularly over the death of Princess Diana, when an ugly public mood threatened the Queen and the Royal Family because of the perception that they were cold and heartless from the absence of public displays of their grief.

It was only when the Queen let people glimpse signs of royal sorrow that this danger was defused.

This general attitude has its roots in the therapy culture, which tells us that it is bad for the individual to repress emotion. That doctrine has now developed into the belief that anyone who fails to display emotion is a bad individual.

It has produced a culture in which genuine emotion, which is almost always private, is deemed not to exist, while inappropriate or vicarious emotion, or sentimentality, is mistaken for the real thing.

This has the pernicious effect not only of devaluing real feelings such as grief, but elevating histrionics such as self-pity and narcissism. Hence the obsession in our society with ’self-esteem’.

One result of exchanging the stiff upper lip for the trembling lower one is that people become less able to cope with the vicissitudes of life.

That is what the octogenarian Duchess of Devonshire was getting at when she recently branded Britain as ’sloppy and sentimental’. Her generation ‘made little of sorrow. . . it wasn’t the thing to bellyache’.

As she said, grief was just part of life — people mourned and then got on with their lives. They didn’t go on about it and need counselling; nor did they wear their grief like a badge of honour, or as their entry ticket to the human race.

To that generation, not just grief but other emotions such as fear were both private and restrained. To be otherwise would have demoralised others and courted defeat or disaster.

But that is precisely what we have now done to ourselves. Our culture of emotional incontinence has made us, for example, less able to cope with war and thus defend this country.

We saw this in 2007, when 15 British marines and sailors were taken hostage by Iran.

After falsely ‘confessing’ to having trespassed into Iranian waters, and arriving home clutching propaganda ‘gifts’ from their captors, some of them subsequently justified their damaging and unprofessional behaviour by saying how terrifying the whole thing had been and how they had only wanted to go home.

Emotional incontinence has also had the effect of turning masculinity inside out. Male characteristics that were once lauded, such as stoicism, emotional restraint and even physical courage, are now regarded as evidence of ‘emotional illiteracy’.

Instead, the ‘new man’ has to be caring and sharing and not afraid to burst into tears.

So when Britain’s tennis wunderkind Andy Murray cried on court after being defeated by Roger Federer — who himself had wept after being beaten by Rafael Nadal — he was praised for showing himself to be human after all.

Once upon a time, stoicism, emotional restraint and a sense of privacy were English virtues that were considered essential to a civilised culture based upon reason.

Which is why it is so unnerving to see British politicians, sportsmen or members of the armed forces display such loss of control.

The trouble is that in our sentimentalised culture, touchy-feely politics do indeed work. Which is why emotionalism is the new spin — even when it really is the real thing.

by Melanie Phillips at February 08, 2010 08:50 PM

Jewish Chronicle, 4 February 2010

In all the sturm und drang over the Chilcot inquiry into the war in Iraq, one feature has so far escaped attention. That is the emphasis placed on Israel’s role in the crisis, not least by the inquiry panel member Sir Roderic Lyne.

To those of us of a nervous disposition, the way Lyne, formerly Our Man in Moscow, has been dragging Israel into the story of what happened in 2003 is more than a little grating.

It feels gratuitous, and seems to play to the odious narrative that the real source of Islamic aggression is Israel’s foot-dragging over peace with the Palestinians, and that the war in Iraq was brought about by a conspiracy stretching from Jerusalem to the White House.

Lyne seems to believe that one bad consequence of the Iraq war he had opposed was to divert President Bush from the real priority in 2003 — the Middle East peace process.

He also seems to believe that Israel was the main obstacle to that process, that Bush was negligent in not putting the thumbscrews on Israel and that Blair was negligent in not pressuring Bush to do so.

This preoccupation with Israel as the villain behind the scenes emerged in the evidence by Sir Anthony Meyer and then by Jack Straw, who chose to praise the ‘very courageous efforts’ of the first President Bush and his Secretary of State James Baker ‘to seek to face down the government of the State of Israel’ by suspending its debt facilities and subsidies.

But it was also Tony Blair who dragged Israel into the discussion, saying that it was a ‘big, big issue at the time’ and — most intriguingly — that when he met President Bush at Crawford in March 2003, ‘there may have been conversations that we had even with Israelis’.

This was because, like Lyne, Blair believed that the Middle East peace process was essential to get ‘moderate’ Arab states on side against Iraq and other Islamist terror-supporting regimes.

As Blair said, though, when Lyne pressed him about Bush’s failure to ‘act more decisively on the Middle East peace process’, there was actually an intifada raging at the time.

It did not seem to occur to Lyne that, with Israelis being blown up on buses and in pizza parlours, to expect them to sit down with, let alone offer compromises to, the people perpetrating such atrocities against them was not only absurd but a morally obnoxious position.

But Blair also said this: he totally disagreed ‘that the existence of Israel has provoked this conflict’ (with the Palestinians), but that ‘the resolution of the conflict would have an enormously beneficial impact on relations with the Muslim world’.

Here, surely is the perennial naivety and muddle in Tony Blair’s own position — even though he is the most pro-Israel British leader in recent times. Of course, relations with the Muslim world would improve if the Israel/Palestinian conflict were resolved. But the Muslim world is the reason it has not been resolved.

What Blair has never acknowledged is that it is not a conflict between Israel and the Palestinians but between Israel and the Muslim world, which pulls the Palestinians’ terrorist and rejectionist strings.

Solving Israel/Palestine will not defuse the problem of the Islamic threat to the world; defeating the Islamic threat to the world will solve the problem of Israel/Palestine.

It is indeed the existence of Israel which lies at the heart of the Middle East conflict, because the objective of the Muslim world is that Israel should cease to exist.

What Blair probably meant, however, was that the belief that Israel was the reason for the wider Islamic threat to the world was false.

That is absolutely correct; and precisely that toxic piece of bigotry is fuelling the hysteria which dragged the former Labour Prime Minister before the Chilcot show trial and the baying mob outside.

by Melanie Phillips at February 08, 2010 09:38 AM

Here’s a story anyone who has been watching the moral disintegration of Amnesty International has been expecting. The Sunday Times reports

A SENIOR official at Amnesty International has accused the charity of putting the human rights of Al-Qaeda terror suspects above those of their victims. Gita Sahgal, head of the gender unit at Amnesty’s international secretariat, believes that collaborating with Moazzam Begg, a former British inmate at Guantanamo Bay, “fundamentally damages” the organisation’s reputation.
In an email sent to Amnesty’s top bosses, she suggests the charity has mistakenly allied itself with Begg and his “jihadi” group, Cageprisoners, out of fear of being branded racist and Islamophobic.
Sahgal describes Begg as “Britain’s most famous supporter of the Taliban”. He has championed the rights of jailed Al-Qaeda members and hate preachers, including Anwar al-Awlaki, the alleged spiritual mentor of the Christmas Day Detroit plane bomber.
Sahgal, who has researched religious fundamentalism for 20 years, has decided to go public because she feels Amnesty has ignored her warnings for the past two years about the involvement of Begg in the charity’s Counter Terror With Justice campaign.
“I believe the campaign fundamentally damages Amnesty International’s integrity and, more importantly, constitutes a threat to human rights,” Sahgal wrote in an email to the organisation’s leaders on January 30. “To be appearing on platforms with Britain’s most famous supporter of the Taliban, whom we treat as a human rights defender, is a gross error of judgment.”

As Martin Bright says, ‘It is difficult to make a stand on these issues and keep one’s friends on the left and in the human rights community, so I take my hat off to Gita. I have often discussed with her how best to raise these issues and she has been deeply frustrated by the way the British liberal intelligentsia gives house-room to right-wing Islamists.’

Read the whole thing

by Nick Cohen at February 07, 2010 01:06 PM

From the Observer on the establishment backlash against libel reform

God damn those scheming neocon bastards. Damn them to hell for impugning the fine work of Mr Justice Eady and dear old Carter-Ruck

Go read the whole thing

by Nick Cohen at February 07, 2010 10:50 AM

It’s the fifteenth episode. They said it would never last this long. This “they” being the people who knew we were going to try to drink Tesco Value W-hite Rum.

This week not under discussion is the matter: has the iPad lived up to the media hype? So instead we talk about John’s loss of nomenclature, and then almost kill ourselves with a frighteningly awful liquid.

This week’s episode is mostly dictated by the commands of one “Royston”, who left a comment on episode 13 in which he listed subjects he would like to hear discussed. Somehow missing his opening entry, “Wales”, we otherwise followed his instructions. Which were:

St Wilgefortis
Battlestar Galactica Action Figures
Sufjan Stevens
Favoured Condiments

Which pretty much sees us through. It leads us toward discussions of decaffeinated horrors and fishfingers, and that’s us done.

We’d love it if you passed this link on, told friends, recommended us in forum threads, pre-loaded it on mp3 players and then handed them out to all your family, and so on. Also, if you would, write us a review on horrible, horrible iTunes. That would be splendid.

To get this episode directly, right click and save here. To subscribe to Rum Doings click here, or you can find it in iTunes here.

by John Walker at February 03, 2010 02:15 PM

Strings of U-turns and revelations put the Tory leader's judgment in doubt. Tough questions aren't yet being asked Published in the Guardian...

February 03, 2010 01:15 PM

As was passed around the internets yesterday, Bill Watterson has done a rare interview with Cleveland.com, of all places, to mark fifteen years since he stopped drawing Calvin & Hobbes.

Watterson’s an odd and excellent chap. Calvin & Hobbes was unquestionably the greatest daily strip cartoon in the last fifty years (I really cannot think of anything this could be challenged by), and made more excellent by his refusal to merchandise the strip. So thankfully we never saw Calvin grinning on birthday cards, nor, as Watterson once wrote, had the reality of Hobbes decided for us by a stuffed toy. Instead we of course had Calvin pissing on VW logos, and horrible knock-off t-shirts of, for some reason, Calvin pulling one particular face. But never anything official. C&H remained pure in its form, a comic strip printed in newspapers, then reprinted in books.

Watterson’s motivations for stopping the comic have changed over the last decade and a half. At the time he made it perfectly clear he was quitting because it was the only way to stop the syndicate from merchandising the strip. He called their bluff. Now he says he had said all there was to say, and it had been time to end before it became repetitive or disliked. Whichever is the case, while I would dearly love for there to be new strips to read, I think he’s right that it was best to end at its peak. The idea that Calvin & Hobbes might have gone on to become as tired and unlikeable as so many of the daily strips is too terrible to bear.

The reason I mention all this is to raise my frustration with the recent interview at Cleveland.com, where the interviewer had such a precious opportunity and handled it so very poorly. The site begins with this claim:

“It’s believed to be the first interview with the reclusive artist since 1989.”

Believed, that is, by anyone who is too lazy to Google “Bill Watterson interview”. The previous interview, famously released five years ago to accompany the tenth anniversary and release of the beautiful complete collection (still almost half price on Amazon, and well worth it), is the second result if you search.

He also, tragically, didn’t bother to come up with more than one question. Instead he asks, “People liked it and wish you’d draw it again. How should they remember it?” five times in a row, and then someone nonsense about stamps. Fortunately Watterson, with incredible grace, answers differently each time, offering smart, eloquent and interesting answers. The result is, amazingly, something quite lovely.

The interviewer explains elsewhere on the site that he asked this question (over and over) because he knew that if he asked personal questions about Watterson’s private life he wouldn’t get replies. Which while true, doesn’t explain why he didn’t ask anything original or insightful about the strip, or the creative process. When you look at the replies, you can feel the potential for what more could have been asked of this brilliant man. For instance, Watterson demonstrates a rare sophistication and lack of artistic ego in his conviction that art exists in its interpretation, not its author’s intent.

“The only part I understand is what went into the creation of the strip. What readers take away from it is up to them. Once the strip is published, readers bring their own experiences to it, and the work takes on a life of its own. Everyone responds differently to different parts… Readers will always decide if the work is meaningful and relevant to them, and I can live with whatever conclusion they come to. Again, my part in all this largely ended as the ink dried.”

Fortunately the previous interview, conducted by Andrews McMeel Publishing, was cleverly assembled from questions submitted by fans that avoided begging and whining. In fact, many of the questions are superb, and his answers, while brief, are frank and interesting. While not all the questions are brilliant, they include the likes of, “You’ve often cited Herriman, Kelly, Schulz, etc., as comic strip inspirations. But who inspires you most in the fields of painting and printmaking?” A question which elicits a fantastic reply from the artist.

Even more worth reading, if you wish to delve into the mind behind the strip, and to learn of the struggles with syndicates and newspapers who made creating something so lovely such an ordeal, is the Calvin & Hobbes Tenth Anniversary book. In here the author, on the verge of early retirement, lets loose his passion for comics, the origins of the characters, and then the struggles he went through to keep the strip as beautiful and meticulous as he desired.

Watterson has clearly made the money he needs to be comfortable for the rest of his life, lives a life moderate enough to not require further injections of millions, and wants for no celebrity. He said his piece, he said it so wonderfully, and now he gets on with his own life. I think the wisest moment in the interview from five years ago is the following exchange.

Q: You have been very persistent in not becoming a public figure, and I respect that a great deal. Is there anything you would wish to tell the fans who do not understand your wishes and why it is important to you not to claim the spotlight?

A: My impression is that those who don’t get it, don’t care to get it.

by John Walker at February 02, 2010 03:00 PM

Daily Mail, 1 February 2010

One of the great unexplained mysteries of the age, up there alongside such questions as whatever happened to Lord Lucan or why toast always falls buttered-side down, is why Pete Doherty is not in jail.

The Babyshambles lead singer has more than 22 drug convictions. In September 2003, he was jailed for six months for breaking into a friend’s house.

Since then, he has spent hardly any time behind bars, even though he has been up before the courts on dozens of occasions on drug and related offences.

In February 2005, bail conditions which were set after he was charged with robbery and blackmail were relaxed so that he could perform in a concert. On another occasion, he was allowed to miss a drug rehabilitation review because he was touring in France. How terribly considerate of the magistrates!

After more than 25 court appearances for a string of drug crimes, as well as assaults and motoring offences, he was finally jailed in April 2008 — for breaking probation and drug rehabilitation orders — for a grand total of 14 weeks.

Since then, he has been fined for yanking a camera from a photographer’s neck and for drink-driving (twice); and a few days ago, while up in court yet again for dangerous driving, he was also convicted of possessing drugs after 13 wraps of heroin fell out of his pocket in the courtroom.

Yet, once again he escaped jail after the judge accepted his excuse that he had left the drugs in his coat by mistake a long time ago.

He had been, said the judge, ‘idiotic’ — but it is surely the judges and magistrates who have made themselves a laughing stock over this dangerous young man.

In any rational universe, a serial drug offender such as this would be locked up. Yet time after time, Doherty has somehow been able to persuade the courts to let him off with a fine or a community or rehabilitation order — leaving him at liberty to draw still more young people into his drug-infested world.

One of his friends reportedly said that Doherty would turn up at get-togethers and treat everyone to free heroin. ‘He often put a grand’s worth of the stuff on the table bold as brass and told people to help themselves.’

Now the latest victim of his lifestyle, 27-year-old photographer and film-maker Robin Whitehead, is dead of a suspected drug overdose after being sucked into Doherty’s seedy drug milieu.

This educated and privileged young woman died in squalor in a dingy flat in East London after spending days secreted away with Doherty’s close friend Pete Wolfe, a crack cocaine and heroin addict — who seems to be unable to give a coherent account of Ms Whitehead’s last days, since he spent much of that time shooting up.

This sordid debacle follows the mysterious death of actor Mark Blanco, who died after he fell from a balcony following a row with Doherty at a party — and whose family has claimed it has ’significant new evidence’ to prove he was unlawfully killed.

However Blanco died, both his death and that of Robin Whitehead are bound up in a lifestyle of drug-fuelled chaos, degradation and violence around a celebrity addict.

Yet judges and magistrates have shown Doherty, the spider at the centre of this squalid web, quite extraordinary latitude.

At Thames Magistrates’ Court, where he had already clocked up multiple court appearances for drug-related offences, District Judge Jane McIvor chose not to jail him in 2006 after he admitted possessing heroin and cocaine, saying she was ‘impressed’ with his attempts to come off drugs — even though his record obviously showed such attempts had not succeeded.

The following month, she said the outlook for beating his drug addiction was ‘optimistic’. The month after that, he was up again for assault, the next month for possessing cocaine, heroin and cannabis.

Yet the month after that, Judge McIvor praised his ‘great effort’ to give up drugs and even told him: ‘Your song The Blinding is very good. The music is very good.’

What on earth is going on here? Why are judges and magistrates behaving like starstruck teenagers?

Is the bench teeming with soppy middle-aged rock music fans? Do their hearts bleed, perhaps, at the apparent vulnerability of this waif-like singer?

Or are they determined to keep people out of prison because of overcrowding, and don’t think drug offences are serious enough to warrant a jail sentence?

This last explanation is the most likely. It all goes together with the general downgrading of the seriousness of drug use and the corresponding belief that the law against drugs is an ass.

It’s not the law that’s stupid, however, but those who administer it who appear to have lost their marbles.

It seems all you have to do is murmur the word ‘treatment’ and the judges leap to the conclusion that the addiction is being conquered and that jail would jeopardise that recovery.

They are so keen to believe that treatment is working, they cling to the illusion even when 13 wraps of heroin tumble out of the addict’s pockets.

Faced with this evidence that, ahem, rehab did not seem to be working, the judge merely remarked that Doherty looked better than he had done the last time he’d appeared in court, because on that occasion he had been sweating.

And so the judge accepted the absurd excuse that Doherty had somehow overlooked the bags of heroin in his pocket, and that he was indeed ‘ recovering’ from his addiction.

You really do have to wonder what they’re putting in the judges’ tea.

How many more young people in Doherty’s lethal circle are going to have to die before those lumps of jelly currently presiding over our courts finally wake up to the fact that Doherty needs to be taken out of circulation to protect everyone else?

The accepted orthodoxy appears to be that addicts are victims who need treatment rather than (heaven forbid) punishment.

Certainly, they may need treatment; but they are not victims but criminals, whose drug activities don’t just affect themselves but cause untold harm to others.

Yet it has come to be accepted, even within the criminal justice world, that actually enforcing the law against drug use is merely vindictive and counterproductive.

The result is that characters such as Pete Doherty and his friend Pete Wolfe are at liberty to continue to draw more and more young people into their louche and deathdealing milieu.

More broadly still, such indulgence shown to the drug habits of the rich and famous sends the worst possible signal to those in the wider society who are vulnerable to the lure of drug-taking.

The fact that Doherty has escaped prison so often increases the risks for young fans who need to be given an unequivocal message that drugs are not only illegal and dangerous but that they simply will not be tolerated, and that those who take or deal in them are sleazy and disreputable.

Instead, the fact that Doherty is able to cock a snook at the law like this confers upon him even greater mystique. His celebrity continues to glamorise drugtaking and reinforce the deeply destructive message that the law against drugs is, at best, irrelevant and, at worst, ridiculous.

The courts’ leniency towards Pete Doherty is an example of judicial irresponsibility and is a positive menace to public safety.

by Melanie Phillips at February 01, 2010 09:18 AM

Running a ‘spoiler’ is the most joyous pleasures the rat like editor can experience. He knows that a rival paper has a great story coming, so he works out what he can about it and publishes another paper’s exclusive as his own.

The Mail on Sunday seems to have done just that with its pre-emptive strike on my Observer colleague’s Andrew Rawnsley’s forthcoming book which is due out in a month.

Sensational claims that Gordon Brown has physically attacked his staff in a series of outbursts in Downing Street – and once in America – have rocked the Government.
Well-placed sources say the Prime Minister has been accused of hitting a senior adviser, pulling a secretary out of her chair and hurling foul-mouthed abuse at aides while distraught over an alleged snub by President Barack Obama. The claims, which are fiercely denied by Mr Brown’s allies, are linked to a new book about Mr Brown by respected political journalist Andrew Rawnsley.

Indeed they are being denied. Patrick Hennessy of the Telegraph, who is, shall we say, always welcome in Downing Street duly popped up.
Carry on reading

by Nick Cohen at January 31, 2010 12:45 PM

Anyone who loves the beautiful Argyll coast south of Tayvallich will know that the Edinburgh estate agents Rettie & Co were not exaggerating when they described the peninsula’s Keills Estate as “a rural idyll”. With Loch Sween on one side and the sea on the other, with views from its beaches to Islay and Jura, with deer-stalking and fishing rights open to negotiation, Rettie confidently expected a wealthy buyer to snap up the property.

They were not disappointed. Iain Coucher already had a company flat in central London and a comfortable house in the Midlands, but he couldn’t resist adding to his property portfolio. For just under £1m, he bought three-quarters of the estate, including a solid home, complete with boathouse, jetty and 173 acres of surrounding land, and two little islands.

No surprise there. Ever since the Clearances, the nouveaux riches have aped the aristocracy and paid to play the highland gentleman. Coucher stood out from his predecessors, however. The new laird of Keills, the monarch of his very own glen, was, to all outward appearances, an undistinguished civil servant on a second-rate railway board.
Read the whole thing

by Nick Cohen at January 31, 2010 12:42 PM

I have a piece up on Eurogamer today looking back at the Nintendo DS. Three and a half years ago I wrote this ‘love letter’ to the DS, celebrating why it was such a strange and interesting platform for gaming, exploring the oddities it was producing, revelling in the glee this produced. Time has passed, things have changed.

So I’ve taken the ‘love letter’ idea more literally this time. It’s a mixture of difficult letter to the console, and article discussing the rise and decline of the games available. I’m pleased with how it’s worked out. It’s also appropriately odd. It begins:

“DS, we have to talk. I’m sorry that I’m doing this in a letter rather than face to face, but I need to express all my thoughts and feelings carefully. I need to make sure you understand. I need you to know that I still love you, I’ve always loved you, but something is wrong.

Remember that love letter I wrote you in 2006? We’d been together for a year and I’d never felt so happy. We were still getting to know one another even then, and you had that ability to constantly surprise me. Every time I thought I knew all about you, you’d pull out another twist, another wonderful talent. Of course we knew this wouldn’t last, but then, at that time, it felt like forever.

In August 2006 I wrote a piece of Eurogamer about my unbridled love for the DS. The console had been out for just over a year and what was happening was extraordinary. While the DS was of course home to streams of rubbish, it was also the place to go for your dose of strange. Many spectacularly odd games, ideas that seemed born of fever dreams and lunatics’ fantasies.

It was the memory one of these games this week that suddenly brought the reality of my relationship with the DS crashing down on me. I remembered Rub Rabbits.

Oh, remember that year. We were always hand in hand, laughing, playing. There was so much laughter. The games weren’t always brilliant, but it was about us, how we interacted, how we learned about each other. Those hours and hours chatting with Phoenix Wright. The strange adventures, exploring with Another Code. Painting together with Kirby: Canvas Curse. It was like nothing else. We were young, we had no responsibilities, people didn’t understand us. And we didn’t care.”

It continues here.

by John Walker at January 31, 2010 09:22 AM

Persisting in this new weekly habit, Rum Doings Episode 14 certainly doesn’t discuss its chosen topic, What Should We Do About The Wheeliebin? It’s with troubling enthusiasm that we begin this latest episode, despite the blatant lack of rum in our hands. Your rules, we don’t play by them. This week our drink is, instead, honeybush tea.

Things we do talk about include the paradoxical anomaly that is BBC 1’s Outnumbered, why Russell Davies doesn’t deserve his “T”, the plot holes in Press Gang, obviousness in writing, and ask why can’t people enjoy their superpowers? There’s revelations of Michael Moore, and then of course the discussion we’ve all be expecting: who should be the next Archbishop of Canterbury.

Then, at long last, Nick’s brief lecture on Derrida. Which is genuinely our most requested topic.

We’d love it if you passed this link on, told friends, recommended us in forum threads, graffitied the URL on the sides of houses, and so on. (Don’t actually graffiti the sides of houses.) Also, if you would, write us a review on horrible, horrible iTunes. That would be splendid.

To get this episode directly, right click and save here. To subscribe to Rum Doings click here, or you can find it in iTunes here.

by John Walker at January 27, 2010 04:44 PM

A soaring speech will be futile if the US president aims to court the centre. He must instead lay out a series of bold new moves Published in the Guardian...

January 26, 2010 11:13 PM

Daily Mail, 25 January 2010

Never is the inadequacy of party politics more sharply exposed than over the issue of the steady brutalisation of our society.

The spectacle of David Cameron being subjected to political knockabout by the Children’s Secretary Ed Balls over the Edlington child torture case is deeply distasteful.

And yet, Cameron’s own observations in turn raise more questions than they answer.

Cameron has been accused of making political capital out of this appalling case, in which two little boys, aged 10 and 11, attacked two other little boys aged nine and 11 with such sustained sadism that one was left next to dead and both remain psychologically scarred.

Cameron said these appalling events proved the truth of his claim that Britain was now a ‘broken society’.

This provoked claims by Balls and others that society is not broken at all, that Cameron is an opportunist, and that his policy of promoting marriage is pointless since the parents of the child attackers were married.

These claims are as specious as they are cynical.

Of course, it is proper for politicians to comment on such a case. It’s right to demand that the report on the failings of Doncaster social services and other agencies, which has been suppressed with the shameless acquiescence of Ed Balls, should be published in full.

It is also right to question the policy of placing severely unstable and violent children with foster parents who obviously lack the expertise to cope.

More than this, however, politicians are also justified in asking what such an attack tells us about the state of our society.

Those who say that it tells us nothing of any significance merely illustrate the moral blindness in which such monstrous deeds are incubated.

True, cases as extreme as Edlington are very rare. But acts of cruelty, violence or sadism inflicted both upon children and by children — at ever younger ages — are not.

And from the evidence of professionals such as teachers, doctors and psychologists, such behaviour appears to be increasing as family life progressively disintegrates.

Many areas are terrorised by crimes and disorder committed by children like the Edlington brothers, who display a frightening absence of feeling for any other living being.

Many children are being brought up, as in Edlington, by grossly inadequate parents who treat them with indifference, cruelty or violence — in households where squalor and chaos rule, affection, faithfulness and trust are absent, and the behaviour such children inevitably copy is brutalised and amoral.

In these households and in these areas, where people fuelled by a constant flow of drugs, alcohol and pornography exist outside the norms of civilised behaviour, society most definitely is broken.

Of course, it does not appear so at all to those in the chattering classes who display all the egregious myopia of privilege.

But there is, nevertheless, a rapidly increasing parallel universe in which social and moral conventions have shattered.

How do you describe a country where two societies are developing alongside each other in this way, with no connection between them? I’d say it was well and truly broken in two.

So Cameron was right to highlight the Edlington case. He was right also to stress the importance of marriage.

Marriage is still the best vehicle for producing emotionally healthy, socially responsible children.

To say that the parents of the Edlington attackers were themselves married is disingenuous, to say the least. This was a fractured household. The mother had borne other children by different fathers, and she and the attackers’ father split up at the end of 2008.

The disintegration of the family lies at the heart of the progressive breakdown of moral and social behaviour — and the erosion of marriage lies at the heart of that disintegration.

Its fragile state is due to the fact that it has been systematically emptied of meaning.

In the Sixties and Seventies, marriage was dismissed as ‘just a piece of paper’ - and from that point on everything conspired to reduce its significance to precisely that.

Because it requires people to act unselfishly, marriage is intrinsically vulnerable. So it needs to be shored up and protected by a web of formal and informal laws, conventions and attitudes — not least disapproval of those who flout its core principles of faithfulness and chastity.

But for more than five decades, those laws and conventions have been systematically eroded or destroyed.

The courts removed the concept of fault from divorce and thus emptied marriage of duty and accountability, causing the rate of divorce to shoot up.

All the informal attitudes protecting marriage — taboos against sex outside marriage, illegitimacy, cohabitation — were similarly struck down on the basis that nothing should interfere with the individual’s ‘right’ to do whatever he or she pleased.

With its spiritual and emotional meaning so undermined, marriage became reduced to little more than a contract of expediency.

At the same time, extramarital child-rearing was positively encouraged by state financial incentives and the mantra that ‘families come in all shapes and sizes’ - including broken ones.

This all took place in the context of the wider collapse of religious-based morality and its replacement by an officially-tolerated culture of moral degradation and collapse fuelled by drugs, alcohol and pornography.

The Edlington boys’ mother fed them cannabis to keep them quiet. Given what cannabis does to the brain, is it any wonder they exhibited such pathologically violent behaviour?

And yet our politicians and even the police are consumed by the fiction that it is not such drugs that are the problem, but the law against them.

Restoring the marriage tax allowance, as the Tories propose, is hardly going to make a dent in all this. It has to be part of a far broader attempt to restore moral order.

This can’t be restored until marriage is properly supported by removing both incentives and approval for extramarital sexual relationships and by putting fault back into divorce.

It can’t be restored unless there is zero tolerance of all drug use.

It can’t be restored unless welfare dependency is stopped dead in its tracks and a distinction made once again between responsible behaviour, which should be rewarded, and irresponsible behaviour, which should not.

Those such as Ed Balls who say the tax system shouldn’t penalise the victims of marriage break-up should be asked how they can justify subsidising the parents of the Edlington attackers, who at one stage were receiving £400 a week in benefits with which they bought drugs, alcohol and pornography, and who abused and neglected their children who went on to viciously abuse others.

Until our society comes to agree that it will no longer tolerate, let alone subsidise, the gross dereliction of duty by parents towards their children and shows instead zero tolerance of drug and alcohol abuse as well as of individual irresponsibility, we will never get on top of this problem.

Certainly, politicians cannot remedy such cultural problems on their own. But their attitudes play an important role in helping shape our culture.

If politicians send out strong and consistent signals, other currently feeble and demoralised institutions such as the churches or the courts might be encouraged to change their tune.

If a culture wants to survive, it can do so despite apparently daunting odds. After all, the licentious and dissolute 18th century turned into the re-moralised Victorian era. Yet other cultures, such as ancient Rome, did collapse.

Which of these examples Britain will follow depends upon the choices it now makes - either for civilisation or savagery.

by Melanie Phillips at January 25, 2010 10:49 AM

A Democrat president does not lose Massachusetts without so dispiriting liberals they can longer be bothered to turn out for him. Inattentive foreigners have been slow to spot the demoralisation because their relief at Obama’s inauguration has stopped them realising that his failure to tackle unemployment and his unconscionable delay in punishing the bankers have induced despair among his natural supporters. As has the vacuity of his foreign policy.

I accept that readers may find this a hard sentence to swallow, but when it comes to promoting democracy, the emancipation of women and the liberation of the oppressed, Barack Obama has been the most reactionary American president since Richard Nixon.

Take the undeservedly neglected case of Nyi Nyi Aung. The reason you have never heard of the Burmese-American is that his arrest is an embarrassment to an Obama administration that wants to “engage” with Burma’s military regime. The junta is holding the democracy activist in solitary confinement. If he is receiving the same treatment as its previous inmates, the guards will be forcing him to crawl on all fours, bark instead of talk and eat from a dog bowl. American senators wrote to Hillary Clinton demanding that she intervene and received no concrete commitments. Nyi Nyi’s disgusted American fiancee says that the message America sends the generals is that they can do what they want.
Carry on reading

by Nick Cohen at January 24, 2010 11:00 AM

The political rewards of appearing in front of Chilcot are manifest. But there are risks, too, of inconvenient revelations Published in the Guardian...

January 22, 2010 10:49 PM

Because TV so strangely doesn’t understand our Earth years, the US lot beginning in September and ending in May, and the UK and AU lot starting and finishing whenever it feels like it, I couldn’t find a way to do a “Best of 2009″ style thing for it. Because TV from this time last year feels like it’s from the most ancient of pasts. That’s – what – almost three seasons of Survivor ago! Imagine it. So here’s what TV is up to. Alphabetically. Oh good grief, I only got to E. So no, I don’t watch all these shows every day. Lots of them finished their runs already. I watch two or three programmes a day (which I’d say would be about average), banking up lots of shows for a day off maybe, or a way to fill a long train journey. It’s okay. It’s not as weird as it looks. The weird part is how I’ve spent so long writing about them.

Archer – FX

After an enormous post-pilot hiatus, Archer finally starts its series proper. It’s the latest from Adam Reed (Sealab 2021, Space Ghost Coast To Coast), and follows the formula: fast-paced adult cartoon with little interest in coherence or human decency. On FX rather than Cartoon Network, it frees things up to be a little ruder, swearier, and more callous. And it works well. The brilliantly droll Jon Benjamin (Dr. Katz’s Ben) plays Archer, a secret agent of sorts, who isn’t quite incompetent but more simply hateful. His mother is voiced by Jessica Walter (Arrested Development’s Lucille), along with Aisha Tyler (CSI, I guess), the compellingly lovely Judy Greer (I loved her in the very short-lived Miss Guided), and SNL’s Chris Parnell. Two episodes in it’s unsurprisingly great, as you’d expect from Reed, and really quite fantastically wrong too.

Being Erica – CBC / E4

There is no girlier show that I enjoy watching, and this one’s astonishingly girly, and I enjoy watching it a great deal. Premise: 30 year woman visits therapist who sends her back in time to previous parts of her life to relive them, to see if she can change regrets. It’s very hard, once that’s been said, to convince anyone that this isn’t some Quantum Leap rip-off but with more mentions of tampons. It’s not. In fact, it’s actually a very sophisticated allegory for the process of therapy. Erica does not go back to change the past. (Well, she does once, and the consequences are big enough for a finale cliffhanger.) She goes back to change her understanding of the past. This may mean she handles a situation differently, generally to find out that the consequences are much the same. But rather than putting right what once went wrong, she instead explores the elements of her past that shape who she is today, and in analysing them understands herself better. With tampons. It’s smart. If always going on about weddings and baby showers.

Series 2 seemed to have a great deal more confidence in itself. The first series seemed to be constantly apologising for its science fiction. Series 2 has no such issues, introducing emo moper Kai as another time traveller, Drs. Fred and Naadiah alongside Dr. Tom, and even saw Erica go into the future as well as the past, along with other time-bending ideas. It also gave us some background to who Dr. Tom is, if not any answers as to exactly what he is. It was still marred by her constantly weeping sister, and certainly far too much time was spent faffing around in Erica’s day job at the editors (do I really care about the office bitching when she could be going back in time?). I still have to apologise to my penis before watching, but it’s my guilty girly pleasure.

Being Human – BBC 3

(covered here)

Better Off Ted – ABC

This came out swinging, and just swings harder and harder. Halfway through the second season and it’s the best comedy writing on TV. Set in the offices of evil corporation Veridian Dynamics, the stories follow Ted, morally ambiguous but entirely loveable senior employee and respected colleague of malevolent boss Veronica, optimistic but unmotivated Linda, and research scientists Lem and Phil. The double act of Lem and Phil is the stand-out feature, but with serious competition from every other character. Linda’s meandering dreams of some semblance of morality in the company, constantly thwarted by her own complete lack of ambition and energy, always ensure the programme never descends into saccharine chipper ways, while Veronica’s inability to comprehend the need for emotion is never corny or clichéd. Ted is a rock, but never simply “the good guy”. And there’s evil mould, killer pumpkins, racist water fountains and memos enforcing insults in the workplace. Most of all, it’s the volume of beautifully written lines, and the extraordinary timing of the patter. Which, it seems, may be partly down to improvisation from the fantastic cast, as this (incredibly foul/brilliant) outtake reel reveals (NSFW).

The Big Bang Theory – CBS

Okay, right, so I’m saying Better Off Ted is the best written, below Community is credited with being the funniest. TBBT’s award is: makes me laugh the most. It’s an odd distinction I realise, but it would be completely false to claim that the writing here is as smart as either of those two other shows. But I laugh so much harder at this one. It’s perhaps down to the performance of Jim Parsons as Sheldon Cooper, whose physical comedy is as funny as any of the dialogue. And it’s such lovely dialogue. The show is still true to its original theme – four genius geeks having the absurdity of their lives highlighted through the perspective of their regular-girl neighbour. It’s interesting that it hasn’t tried to make Penny a genius, or the four guys into more mundane normals. It shows confidence.

The other stand-out feature of TBBT is that there’s an audience. How I Met Your Mother technically has an audience, but one it doesn’t seem to want – it’s so quiet and uninvolved you tend to forget it’s there. But here they’re part of the show, and it’s much better for it. They’re there, not dubbed on, not watching it on tape later (which I have to assume is how Mother does it), and so the cast are performing to them. I love moments where someone has to give up on their next line because the laugh is much bigger than expected. It’s an all but dead art, and it’s so fun to see it still working so well here.

Bones – FOX

Oh, Bones. Bonesybones. You great big silly puddle of a show. The previous season appeared to be an attempt to break the world record for number of sharks jumped by a clumsy exploding clown car, leaving season 5 with almost nowhere to go. Expert forensic scientist Temperance ‘Bones’ Brennan and FBI Agent Seeley Booth continue to solve crimes by getting their friends to reconstruct faces from a piece of burned ash and a left toe, use computers from outerspace, and spend every non-work minute having coffee together. Meanwhile the rest of the cast take it in turns to snog each other. But after season 4 had Booth see ghosts, talk to cartoon characters and eventually dream an entire episode set in a nightclub, well, I can’t even end this senten

So with all glimmers of sense removed, there’s barely any pretence that they could care less about solving any crimes. Continuity was never exactly a strong point for the show (it seemed like the writers played an elaborate game of consequences, where one would show the next episode’s scribe only the last scene, and they’d have to guess everything else that happened), but now it really has nothing to offer but the “will they/won’t they” of Booth and Bones. And hell, that turns out to be enough. So long as Stephen Fry keeps showing up every few episodes, and Sweets keeps counselling Booth and Bones, I’ll keep watching. It’s beyond idiotic, and I love it.

The Border – CBC

It shouldn’t be able to get away with it. The self-assured pomposity of The Border is remarkable. A programme about Canadian border police, that’s somehow about fighting international terrorism, drug cartels, and prostitution rings. For a nation with so little gun crime, they sure have a lot of gun fights. And explosions. And brutal deaths. The sheer volume of peril faced by this group of special agents with seemingly unlimited power (the number of times they’ve defied the Canadian government I’m surprised they haven’t personally overthrown it) is terrifying. I’m scared to go there. The decision not to write Gray out of the show after his actions at the end of the last series has made most of this run seem a little peculiar. But now Grace Park is a regular cast member it’s hard to complain about anything else. Jonas Chernick’s Slade is still the best thing about it, and in series 3 it seems they’ve realised that too, giving him a much more major role, and allowing some phenomenally geeky jokes to get in. Ludicrous, but great fun.

Bored To Death – HBO

This was the best show of 2009. I forgot to mention it. Sorry about that.

The extraordinary Jonathan Ames takes his flesh-exposed confessional writing to television, writing himself as the lead role (played by Jason Schwartzman, no less) in a semi-fictional version of his life. In the show Ames has written his first novel but cannot get started on his ill-advised second, while writing articles for Edition (edited by a best-role-of-his-career Ted Danson) and recovering from the break-up of his relationship. After reading some Chandler and consuming much white wine he decides to place an ad on Craigslist advertising himself as “an unlicensed private detective.”

But rather than descending into a crime procedural, or anything so obvious, it’s always a programme about the robustness of Ames’ vibrant denial and peculiar desire for fun in the face of mundane reality. In fact, it’s so relaxed about itself that some weeks there’s no mention of the PI theme at all. It comes up, he tries to find missing people, or recover lost objects. But more often he’s attempting to rescue the pathetic Danson from what appears to be a life-long mid-life crisis, or prodding his friendship with Ray, played by (one of the greatest stand-ups) Zach Galifianakis.

Ames merits comparison with a 1970s Woody Allen, and each episode contains at least one line that is greater than many writers will come up with in their careers. (“I’ve always been intrigued by Stockholm Syndrome. It makes me think of my childhood.”) Schwartzman is as brilliant as ever, Galifianakis gets to use all his strengths and is used so sparingly that you crave each of his scenes, and like I said, Danson is better than he’s ever been. The guest casting is equally precise, with John Hodgman as a snivelly, spiteful critic, Oliver Platt as the editor of GQ, and Sarah Vowell in a tiny, perfect role as an interviewer.

It’s remarkably calm for a programme about man-children incapable of maturity. The Ames of Bored To Death is not quite as sexually ambiguous and confessional as the Ames of real life – the irony being it would seem less realistic if he were – leaving you sure that there’s no want for ideas and source material as it continues. The first series was only eight episodes, but a second series was immediately commissioned due to its deserved ratings.

Castle – ABC

I’m glad I stuck with this one. Obviously Nathan Fillion is a great reason to watch a show, but the first 13 episode run never really found its niche. Too similar to, well, every other crime procedural, it was the mismatched cop-and-X formula done with little more imagination than Fillion’s charisma to carry it. Season 2 is a complete change. Now there’s a sense of glee about the programme that’s intentionally inappropriate for solving murders. Castle literally jumps for joy at the discovery of a new dead body, and therefore more mystery solving fun. His stoic, glum cop buddy has significantly lightened up, her mopiness given motive (the unsolved murder of her mother) but her character embellished with mischief and an admission of fondness for Castle.

Castle’s an odd character for such a show. The Mentalist works because Patrick Jane is smug and untrustworthy. Bones works because Bones is (mostly – see above) incapable of empathy and inhuman in her mannerisms. But Castle has almost no unpleasant side to him. He’s grounded by living with his aspiring actress mother and calm, friendly teenage daughter. He gets one well with both, which is frankly astonishing for television – a dad who gets on with his daughter?! (And one of the best changes made in season 2 has been to tone down his mother, make her more supportive and less ludicrous.) His gleeful response to murder is distasteful, but infectious. His passion for solving crimes is adorable. And of course the will they/won’t they is a joy, with the pair now exchanging compliments as well as sarcasm. It’s sarcasm with a smile – it’s a lot easier to root for them. And with the most recent episode, it demonstrated an ability to be serious too, without being slipping into being boring. It’s a remarkably cheerful programme.

The only thing left to fix is the supporting police cast. The Mentalist made this mistake in its first season, leaving them anonymously in the background. Now all three are known and fun. You could change all the actors playing the cops in Castle and I’d never notice. It would perhaps be nice to give them some personalities.

Chuck – NBC

It lived! Oh thank goodness it lived. That we live in a world where Heroes gets recommissioned without thought, and Chuck requires a massive campaign for fans: well, something’s wrong. Also, it’s good to be right.

A lot of wrong people declared that Chuck’s Intersect v2.0 at the end of season 2 was a bad idea, as it would make him too powerful. Me, being a genius, I worked out they’d do exactly what they did. It only kicks in at certain moments, meaning Chuck is still a regular guy, but now he’s one who occasionally turns into a kick-ass superhero spy, but not on purpose. It’s lovely that it’s worry that prevents it from working. It forces Casey and Sarah to treat him differently. The humanity of this show is its greatest strength, and it still pulses with it. The constant theme is Chuck’s humanising those around him, more obviously with Sarah, and to some extent to Casey. The most recent episode demonstrated this really beautifully with Superman lookalike Shaw putting on his wedding ring. The Intersect v2.0 has proven to be a ton of fun, and the stories seem bigger, with more action, and despite the comical methods of putting all the players back where they were before they moved them all at the end of the last season, there does seem to have been development in a lot of the characters. And of course there’s the required WTWT? here too, and that’s being handled cutely, if without much originality. I’d like to see a bit more geekiness coming back into the main plots, but otherwise it’s a real joy that it survived for another run.

Community – NBC

Better Off Ted has the best writing, but Community is the funniest. My expectations were low – I didn’t think that McHale had the chops. I was spectacularly wrong. I adored the pilot so much I started it again the second it finished, and it’s barely dipped since then. The only disappointment is the lack of regular appearances by John Oliver, and the enormous over-use of Ken Jeong as Señor Chang. (He’s great, but he’s not as great as the show seems to think.)

Even though the sitcom nailed the characters from the first episode, it’s also allowed a lot of room for their best features and most effective stories to develop and evolve. The highlight of all of these is the friendship between jock Troy and Asperger’s nerd Abed. So strong has their double-act become that they generally get the credits to themselves for some deeply peculiar performances. (That’s until this week’s astonishing cameos, and a MASH joke that made me cough with laughter, took the glory.) Abed’s awareness that they exist within a sitcom could be handled really clumsily, but so far it’s been perhaps the finest part of the show. It’s not quite It’s Gary Shandling’s Show, but it adds a really interesting dynamic, and gives them an excuse to plunder some loved clichés without the need to be oh-so-desperately ironic about it. It seems so good that it would surely be cancelled after only six episodes, but it’s back after Christmas and going strong.

Cougar Town – ABC

Bill Lawrence’s decision to finish Scrubs and move on was the right one. Scrubs had managed to still be lovely after eight years, but was definitely on the wane. He so enjoyed working with Courtney Cox at the beginning of that eighth season that he created a new sitcom for her, and Scrubs was put to rest. Then Scrubs was recommissioned.

Bill Lawrence’s decision to carry on Scrubs was the right one. Enough changed (well, almost everything changed) that the show is reinvigorated, but more on that later. Cougar Town, meanwhile, seemed at first to be an unfortunate use of a lot of his attention. When it began it was very awkward, his need to have a group of friends who regularly interacted so contrived that it felt like watching a series of stage instructions rather than a script. But it’s improved every single week, and now at the mid-point of the season has become something quite lovely. Quickly abandoning the nonsense story of Cox being a “cougar”, wasting her time on men too young for her (something Lawrence stated he would be changing from the start, as it happens, despite the name), and removing the antagonism between most of the characters, it allowed for the six or seven regulars to naturally hang out in a variety of locations, and then the comedy can flow. Every character has had their extremely rough edges smoothed down, letting Lawrence’s best skills shine: affectionate banter between likeable people. It’s not as good as Spin City, and it’s leagues behind Scrubs (but then Scrubs was leagues ahead of most sitcomedy), but it’s become rather lovely.

Dollhouse – FOX

I’m not sure there’s room to list how dreadful this programme was. Room on the internet. A surprising number of people enjoyed the second series more. I put this down to Stockholm syndrome. (I’d like to stress that I thought of that joke before rewatching Bored To Death, so there. Which means I’d like to further stress that I don’t think my joke is one hundredth of Ames’ gag.) It doesn’t seem worth picking over the mess, but beyond the discovery of a wonderful actor and mimic in Enver Gjokaj, there’s nothing I remember fondly. Oh, apart from fancying Mellie. A bad idea from the beginning, and one that never found a reason to exist. The ending was so beyond idiotic that my eyes and ears fell off trying to endure it, and now it’s gone. I’m not sure which is more sad: Firefly’s cancellation, or Whedon making a programme I wish had been cancelled sooner.

Eastwick – ABC

Cancellations are always sad, unless it’s Dollhouse. None was sadder than Defying Gravity (which I’m leaving out since it vanished so long ago, but I still miss that awesome programme), but Eastwick was a pretty huge shame too. Being Erica was my girliest show, but this one came close. Rather than starting the Witches Of Eastwick over again, it took the smarter route of setting it 30 years after the known story from the film/book. A new group of three women make a wish at the fountain in Eastwick, and call forth Darryl Van Horne to bring out their natural witch powers. So in what form will he appear? How can he be anything other than Nicholson? And no, Christian Slater would not do. So when it turned out to be Paul Gross, star of the Best Programme Ever, Slings & Arrows, I squealed out loud like the pathetic man-girl I truly am.

Gross’s Horne was magnificent (snigger), pure evil yet silky smooth and endearing. The three witches were fun, the murderous storylines nice and dark, and I assumed it had enough soapy content that it would keep a broad audience happy. Maybe it was too long after the phenomenon of Wicked. Maybe its tone was too dark for the la-la-la crowds. Maybe I’m mad and it was rubbish. Still, I’m sad that it’s no more. And I’m especially sad that the final episode suddenly jumped weeks after a series of cliffhangers from the penultimate episode that it never resolved, and then ended with even more unfinished stories.

by John Walker at January 22, 2010 01:51 AM

Sorry to sneak up on you, but look, it’s episode 13. We’re going weekly for, well, maybe a week. We’ll see how it works out. Please let us know in the comments below, or to podcast@rumdoings.com, whether you would prefer weekly episodes, or the former fortnightly.

Distracted by a new rum, we take a long time to get around to introducing the topic we’re not discussing: Whatever happened to sitting down for dinner as a whole family?

Instead we find ourselves discussing Scientology, random word snap, and then dive head-first into a chasm of self-indulgence, and discuss the Rum Doings origin story. How John and Nick met, the creation of (the now deceased) Glebe’s Thrift Funnel, and then our dalliance with the stars. As regular listeners will remember, Nick and John have a “no false modesty” rule, and included in this is what so many call “name-dropping”, but we call “talking about people we met.” We relate the stories of our adventures in the nineties in which we met many of our heroes.

Apologies for the slightly annoying hollow mic noise that appears occasionally. You’ll forgive us. Let us know what you enjoyed or didn’t enjoy, either via email or comment below. Or leave a review on iTunes. And please, as ever, retweet and plug this link, help us get heard. We want to be heard by the w-hole wide world.

To get this episode directly, right click and save here. To subscribe to Rum Doings click here, or you can find it in iTunes here.

by John Walker at January 21, 2010 02:22 PM

If Britain's contestants are no Obama or Palin, the ideological divide is real. This election shouldn't be won on flimsy grounds Published in the Guardian...

January 20, 2010 11:55 AM

A FEW days ago, Guernica magazine accused me of not citing sources when I criticised Noam Chomsky. I responded by posting a source-ridden chapter from my What’s Left (you can read the book here and the extract on Chomsky here) which detailed at length the shifty way in which Chomsky and all those who imitate him excuse crimes against humanity they cannot blame on the West.

The extract detailed at length Chomsky’s role in boosting deniers of the holocaust, Pol Pot’s genocide and the Serb massacres of the Bosnian Muslims. I am a charitable man, so I have to assume that Guernica’s Joel Whitney is either very dim or extremely busy. For he says, ‘after reading Cohen’s response, I wondered if he proved Chomsky’s point for him. The problem was that Cohen’s response only weighed in on the very general question of Chomsky’s “influence”.’

Er, no it did not. Read it yourself and you will see a discussion not of general influences but of specifics; for instance, of how the apologists for Serbia constructed a conspiracy theory to explain away the massacres of Bosnia’s Muslims. Perhaps Whitney did read it, but lacked the mental ability to understand it. Perhaps he was in such a hurry to get on with whatever journalists at Guernica get on with that his distracted mind just flicked over the page and did not take in the words. (He mentions using a search engine rather than his own eyes, so I suspect that may be the case.)

Carry on reading………

by Nick Cohen at January 18, 2010 03:42 PM

Daily Mail, 18 January 2010

There’s been nothing like it since the wolf dressed up as grandma in order to turn Little Red Riding Hood into pot-roast.

Gordon Brown now claims to be a champion of the middle classes. Apparently, only he can be trusted to look after their interests.

And there were millions of us thinking that he was, in fact, the unreconstructed arch-enemy of the middle classes and of everything they hold dear.

For sheer unadulterated brazen gall, his pretence surely takes the latest of many mouldy digestive biscuits.

Of course, we can all see the reason for this play-acting.

After the recent failed coup against Brown, Lord Mandelson won his strategic battle to fight the election campaign on New Labour’s territory of aspiration rather than as another front in Old Labour’s failed class war.

In the circumstances, Brown had no alternative but to agree. Yet this is the man whose entire political persona rests upon constraining, punishing and extorting from the middle classes.

Even as Brown proclaims he is their true and only friend, his chief lieutenants are currently putting forward one proposal after another to do them down.

In a speech, Brown told the Fabian Society that he was brought up to believe in the middle-class ethic that hard work, effort and responsibility were what you needed to make your way in the world.

True enough; but he systematically undermines that ethic by treating poverty and disadvantage as if these are solely the responsibility of the better-off, and that the ‘have-nots’ can make progress only if ‘privileges’ are taken away from the ‘haves’.

He’s at it again today as the Government will unveil plans to pressure the professions to discriminate against entrants from independent schools.

So once again, his government will be punishing middle-class people for the hard work, effort and responsibility that he claims to endorse. This has been, in fact, the most conspicuous hallmark of Gordon Brown’s policy making even during the Blair years.

It is the middle classes who have borne the brunt of Brown’s punitive stealth taxes.

It is the middle classes who, deprived of the grammar schools, were forced to beggar themselves by sending their children to independent schools to ensure a decent education.

And then those students from fee-paying and other middle- class schools, who achieve academic excellence through merit and hard work, find themselves discriminated against by universities which have been pressured by Brown’s government to allocate places on the basis of social disadvantage.

Brown’s key ally, the Schools Secretary Ed Balls, has consistently abused his office to use education to ramp up the war on the middle classes. Recently, he brazenly claimed he was ‘totally against a class war strategy’.

But it seems he is merely playing with words by redefining ‘class’ to mean not social background but money — thus enabling him to bash anyone who is better-off.

Similarly, the Government seems to have redefined ‘middle income’ to mean people on very modest means who aren’t actually on the breadline — while the actual middle classes have been rebranded as the ‘ privileged’, who can therefore be clobbered.

Meanwhile, Labour’s answer to Madame Mao, Harriet Harman, is engaged in a permanent culture war against the middle classes and their values.

Her monstrously unjust Equalities Bill will force public bodies, from Whitehall to parish councils, to skew their funding to help ‘deprived’ people and thus discriminate against the better-off.

She has suggested that bus services should be targeted at poorer areas and away from middle-class suburbs where people can afford cars; and she has instructed her department to stop Londoners and other Southerners — aka the ‘privileged’ — from ‘lording it’ over the rest of the country.

In 2008, she said what mattered most of all in determining whether people were successful or not was ‘where you live, your family background, your wealth and social class’.

But this derives from a wholly mistaken Marxist analysis which holds that people are the passive victims of economic circumstances. In fact, this country is full of people who have moved upwards through the class system.

With the right incentives from a meritocratic culture — and perhaps most crucially of all, from strong family backgrounds based on monogamous marriage, which has been shown to be the best means of creating resilient, independent-minded individuals — people can and do rise out of disadvantage.

But both marriage and a meritocratic education system are the very things this zealot government has been systematically attacking and undermining.

Instead, it has tried to impose ‘equality’ — which is actually an attempt to impose identical outcomes by penalising merit and achievement to produce an equality of mediocrity.

Perniciously, it regards social mobility as a one-way street. It says it wants to lever the poor upwards — but it promptly hammers them once they have made it into the ranks of the better-off.

The result has been that Brown’s government has kept the poor locked in disadvantage — fewer young people from the poorest backgrounds now go to good universities than when Labour came to power — while the middle classes are subjected to systematic bullying, undermining and extortion.

In the face of such an onslaught, one might think the Tories would naturally assume the mantle of champions of the aspiring classes. But, in fact, the Cameroons are terrified of doing anything which might paint them as the party of wealthy, Old Etonian toffs.

Seeking to neutralise the Guardian and the BBC by signing up to the equality agenda, the Tories are now wandering confusedly around a political no man’s land. They can’t seem to make up their minds over whether they really want to promote marriage or not.

Their refusal to undertake to abolish the 50p tax rate means they are similarly equivocal in support of wealth — and have now even been outflanked by Lord Mandelson, who has said the 50p rate should be scrapped as soon as possible.

They are also talking of scrapping tax credits for households earning £50,000 or more and child trust funds for all except the poorest third of families and those with disabled children.

Of course, the spending spree has to stop. But the crude political fact is that, while vast amounts are poured into unproductive sectors such as welfare or public service non-jobs, the sheer number of middle-class people means they are seen as the cash cow to be milked whenever a government is in trouble.

If the Tories cannot unambiguously commit themselves to reversing this politics of spite and envy and becoming the party of aspiration, what is the point of them at all?

People’s deepest desire is to better themselves. Politicians who offer this optimistic prospect win people’s trust and votes. Those who offer the stifling of aspiration and enslavement to dependency deserve only contempt.

In 1999, Tony Blair told the Labour Party conference: ‘The class war is over.’ Before the 1997 election, John Prescott, then Labour’s deputy leader, said: ‘We are all middle class now.’

Thirteen years of middle-class pain down the road, it’s the same old class war and the same Old Labour lies.

by Melanie Phillips at January 18, 2010 09:28 AM

Daily Mail, 11 January 2010

Has there ever been a more fraught or agonising process to replace one towering figure by another? (And no, I’m not talking Jonathan Ross or Chris Evans here).

What actually happened in last week’s abortive coup to unseat Gordon Brown is still as murky as the Pennines in the recent blizzards.

The question remains whether this was a spectacularly botched operation by the coup leaders, Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt — or the first phase of a hard-headed if desperate and messy end-game strategy.

It is more than a touch implausible that the pair believed their call for a ballot on Gordon Brown’s leadership would be followed by a stream of ministers flocking to resign and thus forcing him out.

Politicians as experienced as Hoon and Hewitt must have known that courage and clear-sightedness are not the most conspicuous characteristics among their erstwhile Cabinet colleagues.

So might this have been another strategy altogether –to weaken Brown so badly that sometime before the General Election he will have to be stretchered off the political scene?

After all, the sniping against him is far from over. By an amazing coincidence, only yesterday a devastating book by the former General Secretary of the Labour Party, Peter Watt, was serialised in the Mail on Sunday.

Watt, who resigned in acrimony over his alleged complicity in a party funding scandal, clearly has scores to settle. But his account of Brown’s serial dysfunctionality, staggering incompetence and frankly downright bizarre behaviour still hammers home just how damaging to the national interest Brown has been for so long.

Nevertheless, if the intention really was to weaken the Prime Minister through a process of attrition, Hoon and Hewitt must equally have realised the enormous risks for their party of such a gamble.

For they might have ended up merely damaging beyond repair in the eyes of the public the leader who will still take Labour into the election; or even provoking such internal strife that the party simply falls apart between now and election day.

So was the coup a monumental car-crash after all? Some think that, on the contrary, Brown is now the captive of those in his Cabinet who wrung concessions out of him last week as a condition of their support.

For sure, the Prime Minister has been weakened. But the idea that, as the Blairites want, he now really will seek to appeal to middle Britain rather than to Labour’s tribal core vote and will reduce the influence of his chief consigliere, the unreconstructed ‘old Labour’ dinosaur Ed Balls, is surely whistling in the wind.

Look at the remarks made by Chancellor Alistair Darling immediately after the attempted coup, which are said to show that Brown now accepts he will have to make the case for deep cuts in public spending rather than pose as the champion of ‘investment’.

What Darling actually said, however, was that Labour will have to inflict the toughest spending cuts for 20 years — and that Brown knew that, as far as the Chancellor is concerned, this position was non-negotiable. So what Darling was actually saying was not that Brown had accepted the case for cuts –but that Darling would resign if he did not.

This was followed in turn yesterday by Ed Balls defiantly repeating his ‘Labour investment versus Tory cuts’ mantra.

So the great internal fight over strategy is not over at all, but is actually intensifying by the day.

The attempt to get rid of Brown resembles one of those horror movies in which, however many times the stake is driven through the mummy’s heart, it still staggers to its feet and continues to wreak havoc.

It is, though, a mistake to think that Brown alone is responsible for the chaos in the Labour Party. It was the fact that it had already lost its way that caused it to allow Brown to assume power unopposed in the first place.

It did so because there was no successor to Blair as a one-man, election-winning phenomenon who had the ability to persuade people to suspend their animosity towards the Labour project.

So undoubtedly it is time for a change of government. But alas, the Tory opposition does not present the clear alternative that people so desperately crave.

Last week’s abortive coup against Brown obscured the fact that David Cameron was in serious difficulties himself. No sooner had he launched his election campaign than he was knocked off course, appearing to wobble over his commitment to restore tax breaks for married couples.

This reinforced the widespread impression that his agenda is incoherent and opportunist - the result of his appearing to face in two opposite directions at once on so many issues.

He wants simultaneously to appear both socially liberal and conservative - even though social liberalism, or ‘lifestyle choice’, is the direct enemy of the core values of family and nation which conservatism must defend if it is to mean anything at all.

When on his BBC1 show yesterday Andrew Marr asked Cameron whether he was a radical or a defender of the middle ground, the Tory leader’s eyes registered for a split second a flicker of alarm before he replied smoothly that he was a ‘modern compassionate conservative’.

The vacuousness of this formulation was revealed a few minutes later when he asked whether he agreed with the former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey, who argued in a powerful article last week that immigration should be significantly curbed.

In reply, Cameron said he wouldn’t have put it in quite the words used by Lord Carey - but he agreed that Britain’s population should not rise to 70 million because of the pressure this would cause on public services.

But Lord Carey had gone much further than this relatively uncontroversial concern. He said that Britain must uphold Christianity as the bedrock of Britain’s democratic and liberal traditions, and warned of the inability to hold the line for British culture in the face of mass immigration by people determined to replace it by Islam.

Cameron’s delicate side-stepping of this point suggested either that he didn’t agree with Lord Carey or that he was too frightened to do so.

Either way, those millions who are desperate for a political party to reverse the loss of belief in this country’s historic traditions and identity — a demoralisation which lies at the root of its problems — will have reinforced their dismal conclusion that they cannot look to today’s Tory party for relief.

I have long lost count of those hitherto solid Conservative voters who say they will not vote Tory at the election because they feel abandoned over the core values agenda: Europe, immigration or human rights, where Cameron’s pledges are manifestly vapid or contradictory, or the ambiguities and vacillations over marriage and ‘lifestyle choice’.

It is Cameron’s conspicuous failure to ’seal the deal’ with the British public that is driving the Labour plotters. With the Tories still not far enough ahead in the polls, Labour’s would-be regicides think that a new leader might well just tip the balance to make Labour the largest party in a hung parliament.

With both of them leading parties that no longer know what they are for, Cameron and Brown are like drowning men wrapped in a fatal embrace. But it is Britain itself that they are in danger of pulling below the waves.

by Melanie Phillips at January 18, 2010 09:05 AM

Consider the response of liberal Europeans to the last 40 years of Iraqi history. From 1968, an authentically fascist state confronted them, complete with the supreme leader, the unremitting reign of terror, the gassing of ethnic minorities and the unprovoked wars of conquest. America and Britain had, to their shame, been complicit in the oppression, but in 2003 they overthrew the tyrant thinking that he still possessed the weapons he used against the Kurds and the Iranians. He didn’t and the occupation turned into a disaster as the followers of Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden and Ruhollah Khomeini began a campaign of mass sectarian killing.

Anyone who believed what Europeans said about their determination to make amends for Nazism and communism would have expected a principled response. However much they loathed Bush and Blair, surely they would have offered unreserved support for Arabs and Kurds struggling to escape totalitarianism. The British bore a heavy responsibility, as our army was effectively defeated in Basra. With too few troops to fight, it allowed clerical death squads to take over the city. British commanders had to suffer the humiliation of seeing the American and reconstituted Iraqi forces charge in to stop the violence they could not control.

And yet mainstream public opinion has never been interested in offering solidarity to the victims of Ba’athism and Islamism…

Carry on reading

by Nick Cohen at January 17, 2010 10:10 AM

The first series of Being Human (BBC 3) made the same mistake in every episode. The tale of a ghost, vampire and werewolf sharing a house began each episode in the manner of the trite sitcom that brief description suggests. Oh, the wacky adventures they must have! But as each hour-long story progressed, it became darker and darker, finishing with a dramatic cliffhanger that ensured you’d watch the next. And yet somehow by the next week it would have reset back to its kooky sitcom cheeriness, constantly betraying its own potential.

The final episode was different. (Spoilers follow.) Enough threads needed to be brought together that writer/creator Toby Whithouse was forced to begin with drama and stay there, and it was a dramatically better programme. Optimistically, the first episode of the second series managed the same.

It’s now the tale of a ghost, a vampire and two werewolves who live together, but it knew to be dark, threatening and often deeply cruel from the beginning. With the danger of the first series resolved, new threats needed to be introduced, and if the episode was particularly weak anywhere, it was here. Between watching Nina coping with her lycanthropy, Annie attempting to adjust to her slightly more corporeal form, George coming to terms with his having killed a man, and Mitchell’s malaise at realising he was no longer, well, under threat (“You’re a piece of deadly furniture.”), we’re suddenly faced with cutaways to some evil wizard’s castle. Well, an evil Christian’s laboratory. Being able to see what he’s up to, before he’s even been introduced to the characters, the story, anything, feels exactly like every bad cartoon. So we see him performing evil experiments on a werewolf, and it feels like we’re snooping on something that’s none of our business. By the time he is connected to the rest of the show, in the final scene, he’s even more ludicrous, shuffling around their empty house melodramatically quoting Old Testament references from the King James Bible to no one at all. Sigh.

There are other problems too. Russell Tovey playing werewolf George seems like he’s being given direction by someone who’s stumbled in from a 1970s sitcom about trousers falling down while vicars come for tea. He seems to be a perfectly good actor – his furious delivery of “FUCK YOU” in Nina’s face is probably the most effective moment in the episode – but for some reason most of the time he seems to be doing a lame impression of Lee Evans, stammering and jabbering idiotically when a scene calls for calm and severity. This was catastrophic in series one, this Some Mothers Do ‘Ave Em tedium ruining vast swathes of episodes. It’s more contained here, but sadly still appearing too often. Fortunately most of his scenes are tempered by Sinead Keenan’s Nina, who is just magnificent. (She was one of the few highlights of the most recent Doctor Who finale, as one of the completely pointless cactus people, but still completely engaging with about three lines and four tons of green make up.) She has a skill for facial expressions that had me watch her deliver lines three or four times in a row, just to enjoy the dexterity of the performance one more time.

Lenora Crichlow took ghost Annie on an interesting journey in the first series. She was the (deliberately) nauseating cheery one, whose story turned increasingly dark as she was forced to accept the awful circumstances of her own death. (A plotline that would have been hugely better if the so-called twist hadn’t been so glaringly apparent from the first episode as her moustache-twirling evil ex glowered menacingly into any camera he could find.) She seems to have been slightly reset here, back to optimism bordering on simple stupidity, and I guess that’s fine really. Her sobbing after a night of watching Nina’s suffering as a wolf justified any nonsense that was to come, and she delivered the best gag of the episode absolutely brilliantly:

George: Have you ever worked in a pub before?

Annie: No! But I’ve watched the Apprentice, and in the current job market there is less emphasis on experience, because at the end of the day… it is just about giving a hundred and ten percent.

Followed by an excellent exit, stage left.

Which brings up the other important point: Whithouse is a funny guy, and here having the jokes interspersed throughout makes them far more effective. Rather than wondering why there wasn’t a laugh track for half of each episode, so unrelentingly were they delivered before it was time to get gloomy, the humour emerges more naturally from the situations they’re in. (I’m very interested to see what he does with his episode of Doctor Who in a few months.)

I really hope the “everything’s okay again” ending doesn’t mean we’ll be back into that same state next week. It needs to stay dark, because that’s what it’s good at. It seems that none of the actors bar Sinead Keenan shine when trying to deliver jokes, but everything finds its groove when it’s all going horribly wrong. Although I’m not convinced Mr Bible Basher is quite the enemy to offer us much threat. We’ll see.

by John Walker at January 14, 2010 12:40 AM

In our first Rum Doings of 2010, we don’t discuss whatever happened to Britain’s supplies of salt.

Enjoying a cocktail known as A Snowball For The Year 2000, we begin with an excellent description of Nick from a listener, that sets us off onto a discussion of alternative ways of pronouncing words, and the definition of “enormity”, and why using Windows is like being a tourist in Egypt.

Then, as was perhaps somewhat inevitable, there’s discussion of the weather. And weather forecasting. We’re enormously right. Moving on to thunderstorms, you’ll understand this brings us to discussing the Scouting movement. Which of course leads into a conversation about breakfast cereals. And Victoria Wood. And Armando Iannucci. And Chris Langham. Ending on a teaser for the next episode! We’re a serial drama.

Email us! About anything you like. Who knows, in about two months we may read it on the podcast.

To get this episode directly, right click and save here. To subscribe to Rum Doings click here, or you can find it in iTunes here.

As ever, we depend on you to promote this. Please, take the time to retweet it, tell friends, or post about it on forums, that sort of thing. Ooh, and write us a review on iTunes. That sort of thing is very helpful. Go on. For the children.

by John Walker at January 13, 2010 01:47 PM

Don’t worry, I don’t really have any phasers. Phasers are a made up ray gun thing from Star Trek. It’s all part of a hilarious pun you see, in as much as you can make a pun out of something by simply adding some punctuation. Oh it’s all falling apart isn’t it?

I’VE DONE IT ALL WRONG.

This whole pun fiasco was supposed to serve as a devastatingly witty introduction (where necessary) to S.T.U.N. Runner, a fantastic 1989 arcade game by Atari. For reasons still not entirely clear to myself you, the protagonist, had to hurtle down a series of tubular 3D chasms at breakneck speed in some sort of futuristic bobsled. It’s an experience probably not unlike doing the Cresta Run having been spiked with a near fatal dose of weapons-grade hallucinogens, or being shrunk to the size of an ant and flushed down the toilet into a sewer system made entirely of brightly coloured geometric shapes. In a little ant toboggan, of course. I have vivid memories of jaunts to the arcades by the seaside with my good pal Flaps as a child, straddling the brightly coloured S.T.U.N. Runner machine and pumping a startling quantity of freshly-minted 20p pieces into it. Happy days.

It was while playing my fashionable iPhone the other day that I happened to reminisce on those halcyon days of my gaming youth, when suddenly a thought rammed itself right up my brainpipes:

“Why hasn’t S.T.U.N. Runner been ported to the iPhone?”

It makes as near to perfect sense as you’re likely to get from me. The iPhone (or iPod Touch, for the paupers among us) has more than enough magical computer powaz to churn out a game from 20 years ago, and the motion sensors in the iPhone could be used to replicate the movement of the yoke-style controls from the arcade machine. Why, it’s almost too easy. All we need now are the following things (in no particular order):

Licensing rights to S.T.U.N. Runner

An iPhone games developer

A metric fuckton of investment capital

You see? This should be a piece of piss. If that bearded West Country oaftrumpet Justin Lee Collins can just about but not quite get the original cast of Grange Hill together, then I can surely get an elderly computer game ported to the iPhone. Think of it as a sort of challenge which I’ll almost undoubtedly fail and then pretend never happened in the first place.

The first step is to get in touch with the original Atari team who produced S.T.U.N. Runner…

by rodti at January 12, 2010 02:07 PM

Today's corrosive sense of powerlessness was born in the spin doctor's dossier. At Chilcot or not, we need a reckoning Published in The Guardian...

January 12, 2010 01:21 PM

The rumours from the comrades are of one last coup attempt against Gordon Brown in March. The Cabinet will tell him to go and install Alan Johnson. Whether this is likely to happen is open to doubt, given ministers’ gutlessness over the past 18 months, but readers may also wonder after all the non-plots and empty speculation they have lived through, why Labour should bother going through the pain of changing its leader. At present we seem to be heading for a small Tory majority or hung parliament, not a bad result from a Labour perspective. Labour will be able to harass an inexperienced Cameron government struggling to cope with a horrendous deficit, and under constant threat of defeat at the hands of its backbench climate deniers and Euro-sceptics, and bounce back in 2014.

But you can make an argument that Ministers need to act because there is at least a possibility that Cameron will be all-commanding because Brown is leading Labour to a landslide defeat that will take 10, maybe 15 years to recover from.

Here is my version of it

by Nick Cohen at January 11, 2010 10:24 AM

In her indispensable Watching the English, the Oxford anthropologist Kate Fox explores the connection between the extreme reserve and gross vulgarity which characterise our national life by talking to foreign women about their experience of English men. They were unimpressed, to put it mildly. “Ideally, the English male would rather not issue any definite invitation at all, sexual or social, preferring to achieve his goal though a series of subtle hints and oblique manoeuvres, often so understated as to be almost undetectable,” Fox concluded with a shudder. Her interviewees could not tell if men were flirting with them for form’s sake or trying to seduce them and complained about “protean behaviour they attribute to shyness, arrogance or repressed homosexuality depending on their degree of exasperation”.

They did not realise that they were running into the ramparts of ironic detachment which guard the English from commitment as surely as prison walls. The fear of exposing ourselves to rejection, with its concomitant hurt and ridicule, would have led to the extinction of the tribe long ago if booze had not provided a release. No serious person who looks around them believes the media orthodoxy that we have shrugged off our traditional awkwardness and become an “emotionally literate” people. We wouldn’t snigger so about sex if we were.

Nor would we find that drink offers the only escape from an emotional constipation that prevents us honestly engaging with others. To be English is to experience routine frigidity leavened by binges of debauchery. Or, as Fox says: “The role of alcohol in the passing on of the English DNA should not be underestimated.”

Carry on reading

by Nick Cohen at January 10, 2010 09:36 AM

As something of a ‘fuck you‘ to the British Egg Information Service who, as keener readers will recall, have still not answered my query, I’ve taken it upon myself to infiltrate the British egg industry via other means.

Here is the first item in a vast portfolio of advertising material which I’ll send to the British Egg Marketing Board who will immediately hire me, making me their EGG CZAR responsible for every aspect of egg promotion in the British Isles. I’ll then shut down the British Egg Information Service, cackling and wanking as I do so.

by rodti at January 09, 2010 05:35 PM